Translating ‘Asian’ Modes of Healing and Biomedicine

Abstract

This review article discusses the ‘translation of Asian modes of healing and medicine’ in six recently published books by raising seven questions. They serve both to review the volumes and to ask how we have moved from understanding systems of healing in terms of tradition and modernity, science and nonscience, globalization and locality, innovation and cultural heritage, to translating them in terms of assemblages, products, modes of resistance, social (dis-)harmony, and ecological balance. The questions span subjects ranging from the meaning of ‘Asian’ in Asian modes of healing, the object of healing and classifications of systems of healing to their relation with ‘biomedicine,’ modernization and the state, the extents to which communities share healing tradition, and their existential meaning in context.

Keywords:

• alternative medicine
• Asian ritual healing
• balance
• biomedicine
• humoral medicine

Additional information

Funding

This article has benefited from research support provided by the European Research Council (ERC: 283219) and the Economic and Social Science Research Council ESRC: ES/I018107/1).

Notes on contributors

Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner

Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner is professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Sussex (Brighton, UK). Her work focuses on nationalism and processes of nation-state building in China and Japan and on biotechnology and society in East Asia. She currently leads two projects focusing on international science collaboration in advanced stem cell therapies and in biobanking in the life sciences and hospitals. Her most recent book is titled Global Morality and Life Science Practices in Asian—Assemblages of Life (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).